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AUSTIN, Texas (FOX 7 Austin) - A month-long search for a missing person has now become a murder investigation.
The body of a missing Kyle woman was found buried in a shallow grave earlier this week.
Bastrop County Sheriff's deputies have arrested Tomas Sanchez-Solorzano, an undocumented immigrant, in connection with the murder of Yuridia Anaya-Espinosa Nava. As Sanchez-Solorzano is in the country illegally, INS is also involved.
Sanchez-Solorzano has been booked in the Bastrop County jail and charged with murder.
“This is going to be really difficult on the family,” Bastrop County Sheriff Maurice Cook said. "It certainly allows them to move on with their lives but closure, I don't know if I lost one of my children, I’d have closure"
Cook said that Espinosa Nava and Sanchez-Solorzano had a mutual acquaintance, but would not speculate a connection between them beyond that.
Espinosa Nava was reported missing in Kyle back in February. Her last known location at the time was where she had dropped off her five-month-old son with a babysitter. A week later, police found her car in a parking lot in southeast Austin.
Sheriff Cook said his office was called as the case was shaping up to be more than a search for a missing person.
“As a result of their investigation, they developed some leads the suspect might be located here in Bastrop County,” said Cook.
Their investigation led them to Sanchez-Solorzano, who was living in the Elgin area. According to Cook, he was here with his family and appears to have been living in the area illegally for quite some time. Officials pulled him over for a traffic violation.
“As a result things started falling together, after that ran a search warrant on his residence,” said Cook.
After the arrests, authorities made their way to Lower Elgin Road, a small country road just south of Elgin. It's in that area that they found the grave site, roughly 5 miles away from where the suspect was living.
“As a result we exhumed the grave site where the body was buried and we located the missing person,” said Cook.
Cook says in general when someone in the country illegally commits a crime like this, they serve out the sentence here then afterwards they get deported to their home country.